Surveillance Site: Facebook Is a Fairly Good “Friend” to the N.S.A.

Elaborate birthday-reminder service Facebook has a C+ average in terms of complying with requests for user information from law enforcement officials, The Hill reports. According to a statement released by the company, “in the first half of this year, it received between 11,000 and 12,000 requests from the U.S. government covering between 20,000 and 21,000 users. The company said it provided information in response to 79 percent of those requests.” Quoth Facebook’s general counsel—its Friend-at-law, if you will: “We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague requests. When we are required to comply with a particular request, we frequently share only basic user information, such as name.”

This is actually shocking information because there is very little that Facebook users choose not to willingly share about themselves. Was the National Security Agency confused about . . . whether a particular high-school classmate supported marriage equality? Not positive about whether alcoholic beverages were consumed on a recent trip to Montauk? Which Buzzfeed listicle about Jewish summer camp “SO got it right”? Whether a user had “the best birthday ever xoxoxo”? Starved for details about the same mediocre Echo Park sublet that was up for grabs last summer? Unable to wait until the next throwback Thursday to find out whether, as a toddler, a certain user could accurately be described as “the cutest EVER!!!”?

In related news: requests muttered into one’s keyboard about seeing less information about Facebook users were granted zero percent of the time.